First Chapbook Review!
Hey, folks!
First off, my sincere apology for the lack of updates. I just finished a move from San Francisco to Oakland, which made the past month a fun bit of living hell. Anyways, I got White Moon its first review! The extraordinary Ariana D. Den Bleyker of Emerge Literary Journal wrote a thorough piece for my chapbook. The review (along with sample poems from the collection) is right below. Hope you enjoy!
White Moon
by Ariana D. Den Bleyker
One of the great dimensions of poetry is its power of temporality,
its marking and making of mental movement (as in music’s allegro, scherzo,
adagio), the variant durances of its empowering focus and attention. This has
little or nothing to with lineation or length. Similarly sized passages of
Shakespeare and Milton, for example, seem to occur in different time zones of
rapid and slow. Marlowe, Jonson. Pope and Shelly are “fast’. Wordsworth, Hardy
and Keats are “slow”. And this is more than a graduate student lounge game. The
most significant moments in our lives have been known to occur, at the time and
ever after, in a kind of slow motion or breathe-catching brevity.
Many of Hemmerich’s poems are short, taking no more than 15 seconds
to scan. Yet they are decidedly “largo,” slow reads, meditations. I found
myself reading slower and slower, re-reading, a de-tempoing sensation with the
curious confirmatory effect that the closer one gets to absolute zero, the more
one is aware of movement on a parallel track, the transferred motion of our
freighted being. Simply put, White Moon by Matt Hemmerich starts with
teeth and a bang.
With Teeth
the wind sung a
lullaby
that echoed like a
dirge
through 15 rotted
watts
I gnawed redwoods to
stumps for a clear
view
as the sun bled to
bed
on a splintered
throne
peppered with moss,
I gouged a boney
scepter
within my chest (a
sunken flesh nest)
to play with the
night
I spun stars like
silk and
bridged them down to
earth
I pierced the moon
and
held it as a big
balloon
I crushed a
sparrow's icy shells
and spat at heaven
with teeth, I'm a great destroyer
Here’s the book in an icy shell, or, rather, a mouth full of pearly
whites. Strong visuals, suffering and stoicism offered in a language of
charged restraint, and always something that can be seen—spun stars like silk
and a pierced moon held as a big balloon—in the clustering of words and
consonants.
But most compelling to me is where we follow that “great destroyer” down a magical road throughout the entire chapbook.
White on White
sour milk on the
counter
four numbers in a
phone book
one call silenced
a bruised love
letter
crumpled on the
carpet
scattered Prozac in
a tray
smooth leather belt
wrapped my neck
like a grapevine
collar,
dangled from heaven
perched on a chair
four in the morning
I uttered, “one,”
and left
white on white.
No particular fireworks here, no pyrotechnic metaphors, propelled by
a reaching high conceit, but rather a perceptive deliberateness, a detective
ear down to the ground swell of language. Another example, chosen at random and
the more telling for its brevity.
Mono
if I am imperfect,
harden my form
in a furnace of
blood
I could starve for
a tithe of love
or forever dwell
in the lowest heaven
of your chambers
if infidelity is the
inclusive spirit,
lacerate this flesh
for the world has
pillaged your monoliths
and trampled my
crucible
if such turmoil bore
light
I could leave pure,
and
blister the evening
where your garden grows
This is deliberate, carefully shaped free verse,
what I call “reinforced free verse” employing common language that yet has
force, a koanic type property of making you stop as it points beyond itself and
over the horizon of its overt argument.
A distinctive strength of this collection is its obliquity to the personal, its almost Jungian vectoring of imagery along lay lines of earth-air-fire-water, a grounding in the always more than four temperaments.
blank/space
the moon is some
madness
those curl in
popping stars on the
ceiling,
I burst apart stray
thoughts
you keep the lights
on
and drink in bed,
praying the wolves
will dissever
for they await at
the blank/space,
erasing histories
from a page
if you lose my ember
in your heart,
I cannot resuscitate
its truth
we'll wake in the
morning,
perennial prey for the cruel
So, what’s not to like? The poems have aphoristic feel in their
economy and depth but even the great aphorists, Lichtenburg, Nietzsche, Wilde
can’t always aim dead center and in the aphorism, (as in the short poem), there
is only bullseye or a clean miss.
To conclude with two points of received wisdom that informed my reading. First–the only thing I recall from “Creative Writing I” – “A poem should not leave you where you started.” In other words, the poem may or not be “transport” but it should always be “encounter.” This is what Hemmerich’s work does. This is why he is a poet to be watched with a close eye in the future.